Employment: Universal Jobmatch

Lord Freud Excerpts

Wednesday 19th March 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Dubs]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what are their plans for the Universal Jobmatch website.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Work and Pensions (Lord Freud) (Con)]

As I stated last week, our plans are to continue to make improvements to the Universal Jobmatch site based on feedback from employers, jobseekers and staff.

[Lord Dubs (Lab)]

My Lords, is the Minister not just a bit embarrassed that the official government job website has about a third of a million bogus jobs on it, such as “MI6 target elimination specialist” or “International courier for CosaNostra Holdings”? If the Government are anxious to tackle fraud, should they not put their house in order immediately?

[Lord Freud]

My Lords, there is a great deal of confusion around this. I am pleased to be able to straighten it out, because there has been a lot of misrepresentation. There is a small amount of fraud on the site, as there is on other sites. It is less than one in 1,000. We clear them off. This is a hugely successful site. It has more than 500,000 employers on it and nearly 6 million job searches a day. It has transformed the service of getting people back into work, which is of course now at record levels.

[Lord German (LD)]

My Lords, despite the extremely good news today of the trend once more being employment up and unemployment down, there will always be a need for a website of this sort which matches the jobseekers with the job vacancies—and not just Mafia couriers. Can my noble friend tell us whether the security issues around this site are the responsibility of the aptly named Monster Worldwide Inc, which runs it on behalf of the Government? Can he also tell us, under his commitment under his department’s privacy policy, what security measures he has taken to avoid people’s personal details being circulated widely to those who should not have them?

[Lord Freud]

My Lords, we take security very seriously. One of the reasons that there is a difference between the standard Monster site and that run by the state is exactly to make sure that there is security in our site. We work closely with Monster on that. People have to be careful with their information on the site, as for anywhere else on the internet. We make sure that there is proper support for people and instruction on how to keep their information safe.

[Baroness Sherlock (Lab)]

My Lords, when I asked a Question on this subject last week, the Minister was very reassuring. He told the House that:

“Universal Jobmatch has revolutionised the service of Jobcentre Plus. It is a transformative service”.—[Official Report, 11/3/14; col. 1673.]

He added that, of 500,000 employers, only 179 had been looked at for breach of conditions. However, this week the Daily Mail reported that, at the beginning of March, 125,000 jobs—a fifth of the total—were taken off the site. The Guardian reported that, in fact, the department was going to scrap the site in 18 months because there were so many problems.

I invite the Minister to reconsider the answer he gave to me then. Did he know then that the Universal Jobmatch website had so many problems? If so, why was he so reassuring? If he did not know, why did he not know?

[Lord Freud]

My Lords, I am pleased to say that I do know and can reconfirm what I said last week; I can actually amplify it. We are currently investigating about 17 sites for potentially being in breach of our terms and conditions. That does not mean that they are fraudulent; it just means that they may have mistakes in them, they may be duplicates, they may be from job boards, or there may not be a contract with the end user. That is what we mean by being not in compliance with our terms and conditions.

Universal Jobmatch is a very successful system. We are working closely with Monster and the contract runs to 2016. To the extent that there may be some misunderstanding and misrepresentation, the phrase “extend a contract” has a precise meaning: that you run a contract to a certain point, and do not go on extending but renew. We have a policy to work closely with Monster right up to 2016.

[Lord Dobbs (Con)]

Will my noble friend clear up some confusion? Every Labour Government there have ever been have promised to reduce unemployment —of course, because they believe in doing it. Yet every Labour Government there have ever been, from Ramsay MacDonald through Clement Attlee—if my noble friend will forgive me—Wilson, Callaghan and of course Blair and Brown, have left office with unemployment higher than when they came in. Does my noble friend think that there is anything on the website that might explain why that is?

[Lord Freud]

My Lords, to run a successful economy you need to make sure that you do not run it into the ground. I am very pleased to say that with today’s figures the employment rate, if you exclude full-time students, is now running at the same high level it peaked at before the crash. Therefore we have managed to put the right structural changes in place to get employment up to as high a level as it has ever been.

[Baroness Lister of Burtersett (Lab)]

My Lords, Stephen O’Donnell, who runs the National Online Recruitment Awards, said:

“I think it’s criminally unfair to sanction jobseekers for not using such a clumsily built website, rife with spammers … identity thieves and anonymous job ads”.

Will the Minister give a firm assurance that no jobseeker will be sanctioned for failing to use that hopeless website?

[Lord Freud]

My Lords, I make absolutely clear that it is not a hopeless website; it has been hugely misrepresented. Noble Lords in this House would not take criticism from a competitor interest quite as seriously as criticism from more disinterested sources. However, I can assure the noble Baroness that to the extent that anyone is sanctioned, that sanction does not stand. At the moment we are down to a vanishingly small number.